Printed below is an excerpt from Is Biology Woman’s Destiny? by Evelyn Reed, one of Pathfinder’s Books of the Month for November. In this pamphlet Reed rebuts biological and anthropological theories that ‘prove’ that genes determine the social roles of men and women.

Capitalist spokespeople in politics, the arts, and sciences resort to a wide range of reactionary arguments to justify the employers’ assaults on working people, including attacks on women’s right to abortion and on affirmative action, as a means to divide and weaken the working class. Pseudoscientific anti-woman propaganda is used by the bosses and their servants in the Democratic and Republican parties to try to force women to accept second-class status on the job and in all of society. Copyright © 1972 by Pathfinder Press, reprinted by permission. Subheadings are by the Militant.
 

Women are deprived of the kind of socialized work which would give them economic independence; such work is largely reserved for men. Marriage and the family are upheld as the finest career a true woman can pursue. Reactionary contraception and abortion laws force women to bear children whether they want to or not, and in the absence of child-care centers each individual woman is saddled with the burden of raising the children herself.  
 
Dispossession from social, cultural work
Historians often point out that with the advent of the new economy founded upon agriculture and stock raising, many new divisions of labor came into existence, replacing the former sexual division of labor. To give a few examples, pastoral activities became separated from farming; metallurgy, house construction, shipbuilding, textiles, pottery, and other crafts became specialized trades. Along with these divisions of labor in the crafts, there grew up specializations in the cultural sphere, from priests and bards to scientists and artists.

The roles of the sexes were radically transformed in the process. As these new divisions and subdivisions of labor grew and proliferated they became more and more - and finally exclusively - in the hands of the men. The women were squeezed out of these fields of social and cultural work - and pushed into home and family life. With the rise of state and church power, women were taught that their whole lives were bounded by the four walls of a home and the best women were those who served their husbands and families without complaint. In this elevation of men and downgrading of women, they were compelled to forfeit not only their former place in social production but also their former system of communal child care.

To be sure, women of the plebeian classes, the "common people," have always worked. In the long agricultural period they worked on farms as well as in cottage crafts, and they did all this along with bearing children and taking care of households. But working in and through and for an individual husband, home, and family, is by no means the same thing as engaging in socialized labor in a communal society. Participation in social production develops the mind and body; isolation and preoccupation with home chores weakens them and narrows the outlook.

In other words, the division of labor between the sexes has not always been the same. The male-dominated division of labor that came in with class society, private property, and the patriarchal family represented a colossal robbery of the women. This is even more true today with the reduction of the extended, productive farm family to the tiny, nuclear, consuming family of the urban era.

To refute the myths that have helped to keep women oppressed-from the "uterus theory" to the "eternal family" propaganda - is not simply a matter for scientific and historical correction. It has profound implications for the women’s liberation movement. The argument that woman’s biological makeup is responsible for her social inferiority is the chief stock-in-trade for the male supremacists. If this claim proves to be unfounded their position collapses.

Females in nature suffer no disabilities compared to males as a result of their biology. Nor were women downgraded as a result of their maternal role in preclass society. They were held in the highest esteem for their combined functions as producer-procreatrix. Woman’s position in society, therefore, has been shaped and reshaped by changing historical conditions. The drastic transformation that overturned matriarchal communism brought about the downfall of the female sex. It was with the rise of patriarchal class society that the biological makeup of women became the ideological pretext for justifying and continuing the dispossession of women from social and cultural life and keeping them in a servile status.

Only by recognizing this can women come to grips with the real causes of our subjugation and degradation which are today bound up with the structure of the capitalist system. Our struggle for liberation will be hindered so long as we are hoodwinked into believing that nature rather than this society is the source of our oppression.  
 
 
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